Just Ourselves and Immortality
by Ryuujitsu
Summary: Priestess Ishtar spring-cleans, Pharaoh crushes on his head priest, the Tomb Robber robs tombs, Ryou rabble-rouses, and the Lord Sorcerer Malik accidentally banishes Death from the city of Thebes and unleashes a plague of zombies. Egypt-'verse AU.


Disclaimer: Saying Yuugiou belongs to me is like saying the Dark Magician is an electric rodent with a weakness against rock Pokemon.

A foreword of sorts/a note on the history: Would you believe I've been carrying this idea around for six+ years? I first mentioned it at the very end of Eden Rising. It's in the same vein, but the zombies are a recent addition and I've made it my goal to avoid all sobriety this time around. If you are just barely able to detect a story beneath all the silliness—if you can sense the vague and wildly fluctuating threads of a plot—I will be very happy.

If you're recognizing names and places, what I've done is sort of mashed up the 18th Dynasty and bits of Thutmoses III's reign/campaigns and pretended Tutankhamun never happened, because we all know that YY is the Real Boy King. Let's also pretend that the capital remains in Thebes, that Thebes is more of a Roman city than a largish village, and that palaces had at least two storeys and enormous underground labyrinths! O ancient world potpourri.

And, if you want, you can pretend Yami's actually Ramses the Great, and imagine that our story begins several random and short-lived Pharaohs after Akhenaten, but really, it's just an anachronistic mess. I tried for historical accuracy, but my knowledge of the New Kingdom (or any period in Egypt, really) is pretty damn patchy.

Also, fair warning, I don't know if this story will ever be finished. Think of it as a one-shot crack fic. It's meant to be crazy and I hope you do find it a little bit amusing. And, um, hopefully not too incoherent. I got a little carried away.

* * *

><p>Just Ourselves (and Immortality)<p>

i. – in which the players assemble and things get bad, fast

_These are crazy times, darlin'_

The weather priests had been foreseeing sandstorms for weeks, but it was otherwise a normal day in Egypt, the river high and the air a bit wet, though indeed sandier than usual. Two feet from the very heart of Thebes—the architects had failed to account for shoddy construction practices—Pharaoh was sitting down to a late breakfast of honey and rough bread. Being the Living Embodiment of God and Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt, his was bread that would spare his Blessed teeth the worst of the wear, and honey that was only a little bit waxy, and only a little bit stale despite having been imported. He was also glaring dolefully at a pile of State documents, hoping perhaps that the force of his Holy Gaze would render them ash. He had only recently seen his father off to the Embalmer—all very secret—and was hoping the old fellow was having fun in the Afterlife because he, sure as Horus had lost an eye, was not. The Hittites were agitating, the Nubians rebellious, and there were factions in the palace and marriages to be considered. Furthermore, his priests were useless: Seto was giving him the evil eye and Shaada had mostly given up, and was at this moment trying to coax Shimon from the temple of Sobek, where he had been camped in the vestibule for a full cycle of the moon, admiring the virgins and their crocodile smiles.

Women, thought Pharaoh spitefully. He had recently disbanded his father's harem; they had never been kind to his mother and were getting on in years anyway, great dripping bags of flesh, the hags. He suppressed a shudder and, tearing out another bite of bread, sat chewing resentfully until he was forced to spit out some pebbles.

_Ammit eat Isis_, he thought then, quite savagely, who had taken the week off to organize her accounts.

()()()

A mere twenty minutes from the very (off-center) heart of Thebes, Isis Ishtar, High Priestess of Ma'at, paused in her dictation, sucked in a deep breath, and sneezed with gusto. Her scribe looked at her in confusion, wondering how he was to transmit the explosive sound into pictogram. With a series of reeds and birds and one very squashed cat, perhaps.

Isis undid her shawl and wiped her nose down one shimmering linen length of it. "Add furthermore that if he is a moment late—if he should—no, never mind, let me do it—"

She took the scribing tool and scratched, _My dear brother, I have written this to you with all the blessings of Father, and if you are late I will tear out your heart with my own hands and serve it to Ammit, and not give you a single pomegranate to carry home. Your sister Isis writes this wishing you health._

"Run this next door, if you don't mind," she told the scribe. "But leave me the writing materials; I'm cataloging."

The scribe made himself scarce and Isis turned back to the matter at hand: her library. She had, in an effort to appear to have made _some_ progress, pushed her scrolls into arbitrary piles, but now the real task of sorting confronted her. She knew that if she took another three paces forward she might be standing knee-deep in papyrus. The room seemed to stretch endlessly onward, a sea of vaguely fluttering papers. A distant relative had begun the library—a small collection then, scrolls siphoned from the homes of neighbors, who had at that time been hostile foreign polities, said distant relative having herself been a favorite concubine of Pharaoh Thutmoses.

There had been some sillier texts once, love poems and the like, that Isis had rooted out, meaning to burn; her brother Malik had gotten his hands on them at a tender age and had grown hopelessly silly himself as a result. She had since populated the room with more sober documents: histories, lexicons, economic and mathematical texts. Malik appeared on occasion to pick through the scrolls; then, like the finicky magic-obsessed child he was, he would select only the alchemical treatises and vanish, leaving the rest behind like unwanted food.

But she was tricking him today—oh, certainly, an early dinner was involved, and with all the foods the child (Gods damn his sensitive palate) would enjoy—namely, pomegranates—but no meal is ever free, and this meal in particular was going to involve some extensive dusting and polishing. The river was heavy; spring was in the air. Isis breathed deeply, tried to ignore the stirrings of guilt—and sneezed again.

()()()

Elsewhere, in the weird and winding underbelly of the House of Pharaoh, the Head Chef had noticed the loss of his second-best knife. As a younger man and paranoiac he would have raised the alarm; as a senile and somewhat miraculous septuagenarian, he was immediately distracted by the arrival of the morning catch—geese and fish, the best the great Nile had to offer—still squawking and flopping in persistent but futile attempts to escape their baskets. Three men in stained shentis, wigs askew, were spreading a brilliantly yellow sheet across the beaten-earth floor for their master's use.

This was not standard procedure, but the Head Chef had served—or should we say, had survived—four Pharaohs, nine wars, and three wives, and if he felt like arranging fish on the ground in order of increasing iridescence, so be it. He was croaking along to a war ballad; his assistants had come to understand that this meant soup. Huge vats of water were already boiling. His sous-chefs lifted up their third-rate knives and began to behead geese.

()()()

Just as the first gleaming cleaver came crashing down, and not very far away, Ryou of Thebes, radical, dissident, and political agitator, began an undignified scramble out of the window of his hovel.

The window—there was only one—was wide enough to accommodate a child's head and shoulders; Ryou wriggled through with relative ease, though he suffered a moment's terror when Pharaoh's finest guardsmen swiped at and seized his ankle. He screamed and kicked and flailed and landed in a heap in the dirt, and with a vague scuttling motion like a crab half-crawled, half-sprinted toward the main street, gasping with panic. Pharaoh's finest guardsmen, huge admirable fellows, threw their heavy bodies through the window—punching through the clay of the wall—and made swift pursuit.

The alleys Ryou was running madly through were streaked with his own voluminous graffiti, in flowing white script, beautiful poetic scrawls denouncing all manner of evils: Pharaoh, the oppression of the people, the death of religious freedom, and the controlled breeding of work mules and warhorses which was both cruel and unnatural, among other things. _RYOU OF THEBES CAN SUCK MY COCK,_ proclaimed other walls. _THE DRUNKARDS CLUB SUPPORTS RYOU OF THEBES FOR THEY ARE INTIMATELY ACQUAINTED WITH HIS MOTHER, A WHORE._

Ryou's mother had in fact not been a whore but a rather vocal supporter of Aten, for which they had dragged her out of the Temple of Isis and killed her, not in front of Ryou but in front of Ryou's father, a scribe, who had had a fondness for recounting the bloody tale at mealtimes. He once reenacted the stabbing with such enthusiasm that he inhaled a stone-pitted chunk of a bread and asphyxiated on the spot.

Ryou had then been fourteen, already in the habit of hiding his face at market, for the private soldiers of Wosret the Wealthy were culling the streets for the scribe's brat who had denounced their master in public as sick, twisted, and perhaps worst of all, flatulent. He spent the next two years in hiding abroad, traveling with a merchant family from Canaan. The stint came to an abrupt end when they were bankrupted by desert bandits, who during the attack mistook Ryou for a Canaanite maiden and dragged him back to their village after slaughtering his colleagues. He made off on foot after nightfall, having spent the better part of the afternoon defending his maidenly honor with a bronze pot. The shock of the entire affair had turned his hair quite ibis white.

Eighteen now, thin like a reed and faster than the wind that shrieked sometimes across the banks of the Nile, Ryou of Thebes was running for his life. He was doing a fair job of it, too, ducking and weaving and jabbing with his elbows whenever possible.

Exploding into a main street, he skirted an oxen cart and crashed through a pottery stall with Pharaoh's guardsmen crashing after him. ("_Aiiegh_," came the potter's anguished wail. Accident prone even as a child, the man had made an unfortunate career choice and ought to have become a grape-crusher like his father before him. But practicality withers in the face of inspiration.)

Ryou was running circles around Pharaoh's guardsmen but had a vague feeling he wouldn't be able to keep it up forever. And in all of Thebes there was really only one place he could go seeking sanctuary. Granted, running screaming and flailing to the Temple of Isis hadn't done his mother one iota of good, but Ryou wasn't a monotheist and the current Pharaoh wasn't a spear-waving religious reformist maniac, or at least that was what Ryou was feverishly hoping as he squeezed through a narrow crevice between two mud-homes and made off in the general direction of the very heart of Thebes.

()()()

In the airy corridor outside Pharaoh's rooms of State, the emissary of Mitanni was pacing and plotting. A well-fed but self-conscious fellow, he had the habit of sucking in his stomach while conducting matters of State, but had this morning gorged himself to such an extent that pulling in his bulging gut proved an impossibility. It was not how he wanted to meet Pharaoh—certainly not while he was proposing marriage—it was one thing for a woman of Mitanni to be well-endowed, but quite another for a former field leader to possess the same hips, stomach, and breasts—but there was nothing to be done about it. Gut or no, his eloquence would dazzle the boy and sell the princess' case well.

The lady of Mitanni, he would begin, is much like her mother in looks. (There was no need to expound on the traits she had inherited from her father—the immense, dagger-like nose and rotted teeth were unimportant.) Ra admires her daily, for her pale smoothness and her honeyed voice; her talents are numerous as the stars which adorn the body of Nut. From birth she has loved you, my brother. From birth she has desired to be your wife.

Surely Pharaoh lusted for the touch of a woman like any young man. And he had no aunts, nieces, or sisters to marry. The match was as good as theirs, and upon the birth of an heir the power of Egypt would come naturally into their hand. The emissary of Mitanni recalled these facts with a wide smile and noted, more happily, that the effects of indigestion were fading. Bracing his back against a pillar, he tried once more to reign in his paunch. His oiled stomach shifted the barest of fractions, and it was at this moment that the emissary of Mitanni was gutted like a fish—a skilled blow that flayed him open from windpipe to groin. As he lay expiring on the floor, the mysterious hand which had done the deed withdrew once more into the shadows.

()()()

On a rolling barge two days North of Thebes, another emissary—he of the Hittites—was in the middle of an inconvenient realization: no longer was he impervious to motion sickness.

"My lord?" said the cabin boy uncertainly.

Pegasus settled back among the cushions; far be it from him to allow a slight discomfort to ruin all his pleasures (which were, like his name and his silly speech affectation, rather Greek). "No, no, my dear boy," he drawled. "You're doing marvelously. Do carry on."

()()()

At the moment of orgasm, many miles away**, **one Lord Sorcerer Malik Ishtar, brilliant magician and Theban fashion plate, dropped a black wig over his own unruly blond hair and began the delicate process of patting it into plaits were fat, oily from the last grease-cone and smelling deliciously of cedar. He pushed the wig left, then right and slightly forward. Satisfied, Malik brought his fingers—the nails had been lightly stained with henna—to his nose and sniffed appreciatively. He raised his mirror and examined his reflection in its filmy copper surface.

His was a very pretty face, slim and dark and shaved smooth, the blond eyebrows carefully blacked, the violet eyes offset by the strings of Sinai turquoise he wore around his neck. There was a bit of a mad gleam in those eyes.

The eyes were in need of a touch-up, Malik decided. He lifted the mirror higher and groped around his dressing table for the kohl stick.

"MALIK," said Isis through the wall. Malik twitched, dropped the mirror, and dragged a slanting black line across his cheekbone.

"MALIK," Isis said. "DID YOU GET MY MESSAGE?"

"Oh _damn_," Malik said, retrieving his mirror to survey the damage. "Fuck!" he exclaimed.

"WHAT?" said Isis.

"Osiris' left testicle," Malik murmured to his reflection. He sucked in a breath and bellowed, "YES, SISTER. I AM COMING."

"WELL, HURRY UP," Isis said.

"What is the point of messages," Malik asked his reflection, "if you're just going to shout at me through the wall? Really, what is the point?"

"WHAT DID YOU SAY?" said Isis.

"NOTHING," Malik bawled. "GO AWAY."

He began to wipe the stray line away and stopped.

"Hmm," he said, turning his head from side to side.

Then, working with swift, smooth strokes, he outlined his left eye and drew a thick, black line just below it, to match the one on the right.

"There," Malik said. "Fantastic. I'm a genius! You think so too, don't you?" he asked his mirror. "That's right."

"MALIK, YOU'RE LATE," said Isis.

Malik rolled his eyes. He gave his wig one last pat, grinned at his reflection, and swept from the room. "I SAID I'M COMING," he yelled. "THERE'S NO NEED TO SHOUT, YOU SOUND LIKE A FISHWIFE."

Isis' response was muffled but indignant, and sounded vaguely like, "The hell I do!"

Abandoned on the dressing table, the reflection in Malik's mirror smiled and winked and licked its carmine-stained lips.

()()()

Far away in the badlands, but nearer to the Theban necropolis than proper authorities would have liked, a tomb robber with hair the exact luminous sheen of polished bone and a nasty knife wound under one eye was kicking the corpse of his camel and cursing the Embalmer for a two-faced, mangy, flea-bitten jackal son-of-a-whore.

He did so perhaps subscribing to those braver philosophers who had recently begun questioning the very existence of Gods in a globalizing, artificial world. But the ears of the Embalmer are not so flea-bitten that they cannot hear the foolish oaths of mortals, nor is the Embalmer, that mangy jackal son-of-a-whore, so entangled in funereal linens that He is incapable of swift and crushing retaliation. He could surely have brought down a mighty and fitting retribution upon the head of a blaspheming tomb robber, but, as Thoth will attest to all curious souls before the Weighing of the Heart, deep down—deep, _deep_ down—the Embalmer had a sense of humor. Black, morbid humor—but humor nonetheless. He liked inventive invective as much as the next fellow. And fine, cold, bitter beer swallowed over a game of senet with colleagues. Maybe even long walks on the banks of the Nile. Really, He was a sweetheart—so Thoth swore on His magnificent curling beak. A real puppy.

Puppies play-wrestle; puppies chase tails. Perhaps in some isolated region of the world there are also puppies who enjoy the tortured howls of the dead as their hearts are devoured by Ammit as fine music—and if so, the Embalmer was certainly one of those. But we digress: regardless of how erroneously Thoth perceived His friend and brother, the majestic gleaming Person of the Embalmer would not have concerned Itself with the lowly insults of a single flea-bitten and mangy tomb robber. And in a half hour's time there would be other problems—namely, One Big Problem—to divert Him further.

(Granted, the tomb robber would be involved. He was always involved. It was a strange consistency that had, stranger still, continued to elude the Embalmer's notice. Though Amun had noticed, because he was watching. He was _always_ watching.)

()()()

Pharaoh's day, far from congealing into a single lump of a Problem, was dissolving into a series of smaller and more irritating crises. At the attendant's shriek, the Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt emerged from the room where he had been conducting Important State Business to find the plump and balding emissary of Mitanni sliced, diced, and quite dead on the floor. Blood and fat, glistening, _ruptured_ intestines spread outward in a coagulating blackened mess. The attendant had vomited and swooned with bile still dribbling out of her mouth, and the combined stench was incredible.

Now, Pharaoh was a leader of State, father and mother to all His people, a stone-faced stoic, a model of endurance, the possessor of the strongest stomach in all of Egypt. That said, He might have shuddered, made an appropriate noise—a brief, dignified expression of horror and disgust.

"Oh—for—the—love—of—Ra!" screamed Pharaoh, as his guards came running. "Oh, _FUCK ALL!_"

Seto materialized from a shadowy corner as he was wont to do.

"Well," he said.

"_Do—something—Seto_," Pharaoh said feebly, and gagged.

"No," Seto said, in a voice that managed to be both like thunder and honey, "don't move the body." He gestured at the attendant with a long well-muscled arm bare of all adornment save a few tasteful electrum circlets. "Take her away—revive her—bring her to my rooms. I want to question her."

The guards hesitated.

"Do as he says," Pharaoh commanded, throwing out his arm in a hopeless attempt to copy the elegance of Seto's earlier movement. For a moment he felt sadly reduced, returned to a past where he stood, a gawky child of ten, beside his cousin, grown lithe and graceful like a panther and burned dark from months spent at war in Nubia. But his was the voice of Pharaoh and Pharaoh's guards obeyed with alacrity, seizing the insensible attendant under the arms and dragging her away.

Seto sent him a wry grin, and Pharaoh noticed (as he had at nuncheon three days before) how beautifully his winged pectoral set off the strange blue of his eyes.

"Now, Cousin," Seto said, "stay where you are." He crouched down beside the emissary of Mitanni, sweeping the pristinely white edges of his shenti out of harm's way and into the crook of his arm and revealing a tantalizing expanse of sun-kissed leg in the process.

Pharaoh gulped audibly and turned his eyes toward the ceiling where there were, he noted inanely, no spatters of blood, but many rows of very prettily sketched papyrus plants.

He returned his attention to the bloody tableau at his feet, where Seto was frowning intently at the emissary's chest.

"What are you doing?" Pharaoh asked, when the silence had become excruciating.

"Searching for clues, O Pharaoh," Seto replied. He drew a small bronze instrument from the folds of his shenti and poked at the edges of the gash. Pharaoh choked and looked quickly away again. "I gather, for instance, from the depth and angle of the fatal wound, and the ferocity and number of additional wounds, that our lord high ambassador did not stab himself. You see?"

"Father of all, no," said Pharaoh faintly but vehemently. "I can't look."

"Pray don't, if it upsets you," Seto said. "Now, this is interesting. He was leaning against the pillar when his death found him—may I? When his death found him—"

He rose with fluid grace and stepped neatly around Pharaoh as he spoke, and Pharaoh choked again (indignantly) as Seto's fingertips pressed suddenly against his lower lip and then drew languidly downwards, tracing a line over his throat and chest and stomach.

"Yes," Seto murmured, and his voice was all honey now in Pharaoh's ear, and his chest warm at Pharaoh's back, "one stroke _split_ him from chin to gut, and he slid quietly to the ground—he could not_ cry out_—the wound stole his voice away. Then his killer _straddled_ him—I will not demonstrate—and administered the subsequent wounds—" fingers touched Pharaoh's hips, belly, ribs, collarbones, shoulders "—to disguise the first cut, I believe, and give the whole an appearance of a crime of _passion_, an _orgy_ of violence. But we are not fooled, are we, Cousin?"

"Hnnghk," Pharaoh said.

"No, we are not," Seto said, softly. "And as for the _weapon_—something sharp enough to cut through all that fat with _a single thrust_—but not _long_ enough to _penetrate_ the back. So, neither _sword_ nor _spear_, and certainly not the curving knives favored by Nubian warriors—"

"A good straight Egyptian dagger, then," Pharaoh gasped, feeling as though he were strangling. "Priest—you forget yourself."

"Ah," Seto said, releasing him. "Sincerest apologies."

"No n-need to apologize, S-Set, just don't do it again, th-th-that's all," said Pharaoh magnanimously. He staggered backwards until his shoulders hit a pillar, and then he knelt creakily down to watch Seto at his work. Corpses, it seemed, made him weak in the knees.

()()()

Twenty minutes from the sort-of very heart of Thebes, as Pharaoh sighed over the lines of his cousin's shoulders, the Lord Sorcerer Ishtar wobbled and fell to his knees in front of his sister's vast library.

"Oh, Isis," he said. "Oh, Isis—_for me?_"

Isis slapped his hands away from a text of Babylonian love songs. "No, idiot," she said. "I'm getting rid of them."

It was too late. "Since for the king, for the lord, I bathed," Malik chanted, snatching up a clay tablet. "Since for the shepherd Dumuzi I bathed—

Since with paste my sides were adorned,  
>Since with balsam my mouth was coated,<br>Since with kohl my eyes were painted,  
>Since by his fair hands<br>My loins were pressed—

—hah! Brilliant stuff. Sister, you can't get rid of these. If you don't want them," he added generously, "I'll take them off your hands. I'll move them myself. _The hair of my lap! My sweet womb! His black boat!_ Oh, Ra!"

"Hathor, give me patience," Isis muttered. She raised her voice over Malik's delighted recitations. "I would rather see these poems crushed and burned to ashes than give them to you."

"Sister, how could you?" Malik said, breaking off from a lewd ditty to a 'short silvery girl.' "You wouldn't."

"I could, and I would," Isis said firmly. "They have made you unutterably silly. I only wish I could have curbed their influence in your youth. And what have you done to your eyes? You look ridiculous."

"It will be all the latest rage in Thebes in a week, just you wait," Malik said, unfazed. "Oh, Ra, listen to this!

Genitals of my girl-friend,  
>The district of Babylon is seeking a rag.<br>Genitals with two fingers,  
>Why do you constantly provoke quarrels?<p>

Genitals with two fingers!" he crowed, and tumbled sideways laughing. "Babylonian poets are splendid, aren't they, Sister? I'm so glad to count myself one of their descendents."

"_I'm_ not," said Isis grimly. "Quarreling genitals, indeed. Put it aside, Malik, I will burn that one myself."

"But, Sister," Malik said, "this is _art_!"

Isis opened her mouth to retort, then shut it again as someone let loose a horrible scream just beyond their walls.

Shimon, she thought, in search of medical aid after he had, finally, leaned too close to one of Sobek's virgins and been summarily bitten—possibly even castrated!

There came a second scream, more agonized than the first.

"Ra!" Isis said. "What on earth?"

"Another poor sod in search of sanctuary, no doubt," said Malik. He had taken the opportunity to dive headlong into Isis' texts, and his voice issued now from beneath a mound of papyri. "'Tis the season for religious persecution. Hey, what's this?" He reemerged, wig askew, with a sizeable scroll cradled tenderly in his arms. "Oh, Sister, can I have this one?"

The scroll was the thickness of a grown man's thigh and about as long, blackened and fire-damaged, as though someone had already tried to burn it. Once opened, Isis thought, it must stretch many feet. It was a testament to the chaos of her library that she had never set eyes on it before.

"What is it?" Malik asked, stroking it as though it were a cat that had consented to be picked up and was now in need of soothing. His fingertips came away smeared gray with dust and ash.

"A history of some mythical place or another," Isis said, distracted. The screaming had grown rather insistent. "I really do think they might be stabbing him, Malik."

"Better let him in," Malik said. "He can help you with your spring cleaning, if he lives. Thoth's beak, this must be hundreds of years old!"

"Yes," Isis decided. "But this is absolutely the last time I grant sanctuary to anyone. We really must put up a sign. You'll be all right in here?"

"Mm," said Malik, absently. He had begun to unfurl the scroll and was examining it on his hands and knees.

"Right," said Isis, and, rolling up her metaphorical sleeves, she went out to rescue her fourth monotheist of the season, leaving Malik alone with the black scroll.

This was, in retrospect, a mistake.

()()()

Pharaoh's finest guardsmen were not, in fact, stabbing Ryou but attempting to drag him away from the front pillars of the complex rather deceptively known as The House of Isis. Ryou was screaming because they were attempting to drag him away by the hair. Every attempt brought forth a screech more bloodcurdling than the last.

"_I—will—have—sanctuary_," Ryou gasped, between screams.

"What is all this commotion?" said the voice of his salvation.

Ryou looked around, though the motion cost him: the captain of the guards, with an exasperated shout, finally succeeded in wrenching his head backwards and slamming him into the dust.

Ryou kicked and yelled. "No!" he screamed, "no, no, let go of me," and found himself looking up into the face of a woman so beautiful he could have easily believed she was the goddess Isis herself, taking human form to rescue him.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen," the goddess said, "I believe there has been a mistake."

"No mistake," said the captain who had Ryou by the hair.

"What crime has he committed but that of pure-hearted worship?" said the goddess. "So it is Aten to whom he sings his praises at dawn and dusk. What does it matter? After all, is not Aten but one aspect of the almighty creator, Ra? Release him and be at peace."

There was a brief, dumbfounded silence.

"Lady Ishtar," said the captain, tightening his grip on Ryou's hair and hauling him to his feet, "I don't know what you've heard, but this ain't no monotheist. He's a lunatic who believes in animal rights, and he's wanted for the desecration of city walls with political graffiti—"

"The public deserves to know the _truth_," said Ryou indignantly.

"He's condemned Pharaoh's army's treatment of warhorses as inhumane—"

"The use of spiked cheek-plates is cruel!" Ryou exclaimed.

"—and three days ago he stole half the geese from Lord Sheftu's fish pond and released them into the wild."

"Did he?" Lady Ishtar said. "How eccentric."

"They were living in overcrowded conditions," Ryou muttered. "It was _unhealthy_."

"Well, gentlemen," said the Lady Ishtar. "I confess myself fascinated, utterly _entranced_. Please, release this madman into my custody. Allow me the pleasure of his company at my supper table. I have always wished to entertain a young insane person. A childhood desire! Since birth! Truly! I thank you, gentlemen. Do allow me to see you off the premises."

"He is to be flogged and jailed!" protested the captain of the guards.

"Yes, yes, certainly," said the Lady Ishtar, ushering them out into the street. "I shall ask him his life's story and deliver him to the nearest gaol in the morning. Seven and seven times I thank you, gentlemen. Yes—goodbye."

As the guards shuffled off, baffled, filthy, and grumbling amongst themselves, Ryou flung himself into the dust again and begged the Lady Ishtar to accept his sincerest thanks and, if she so desired, his eternal devotion.

She dislodged him from her sandals gently but firmly.

"My dear young madman," she said, "I fear it falls to me to correct a misapprehension. You seem to be laboring under the impression that this is the House of Isis."

"It's not?" said Ryou blankly, and a bit hoarsely.

"It is _a_ house of _an_ Isis," the Lady Ishtar said. "Which is to say, _my_ house, and not the house of the goddess, which is—for future reference—five minutes on foot that way. It is, furthermore, the residence of another deranged person, my brother, the Lord Sorcerer Ishtar, and the home of an extremely large and ramshackle library that is in desperate need of dusting. I now enlist you for those purposes. I trust you will not disoblige me. Nod once if you understand."

Ryou nodded.

"Good. Rise and enter! And do be quick about it," the Lady Isis Ishtar urged. "My brother has not shouted a single line of Babylonian poetry at me in twenty-seven entire minutes. I fear he is up to some mischief."

()()()

Deep in the Theban necropolis, our flea-bitten and mangy tomb robber was definitely up to some mischief. Having given his recently deceased camel one last kick before abandoning it to the desert sands, he had returned to a tried and true method of relaxation, namely, was the removal of numerous priceless objects from the skeletal remains of the long dead, who had surely gotten tired of their trinkets in the netherworld anyway. He reasoned that he was doing them a favor, variety being the spice of (after)life.

Underground now, the sound of his nefarious activities smothered by the thick walls of earth surrounding him, the tomb robber pocketed rings, necklaces, pectorals, circlets, armbands; he plucked away amulets cut from precious and semiprecious stones; he chiseled lapis lazuli eyebrows and carnelian lips from funeral masks, and he hummed a little tune while doing it. His itching flea-bites, the misfortune of the dead camel, and the sins of the gods against him were all forgotten. As he stuffed a handful of golden bracelets into his satchel, he reflected that it was indeed a beautiful world.

Years ago, as a shivering orphan divesting his first grave of its contents, the tomb robber had offered down fifty separate prayers to the Embalmer. The grave's occupant had not been wealthy, and had taken to the other side only six sparse strings of glass and a single djed amulet in bronze. He had drawn the amulet from where it lay nestled between the yellowed bones of her neck and spent the next month in constant fear for his life, expecting at every moment to be struck down by evil spirits. No spirits had accosted him, and at the wise old age of twenty-two, he no longer believed in them.

He was about to discover a reason to believe again.

()()()

Alone in his sister's library, the Lord Sorcerer Ishtar pored over his newfound treasure. He still believed he had unearthed little more than a book of unusual ancient poetry, its verses morbid but beautifully lyrical, and had begun to entertain vague, half-formed thoughts of translating its contents and presenting them to Pharaoh on the anniversary of His wondrous birth next month.

He discovered one poem that had not been totally destroyed by fire, and, tracing the cuneiform with an ashy finger, began to chant it the way he imagined the bards of Sumerian courts of days gone by might have.

" 'The rivers of the netherworld produce no water,' " Malik sang. " 'No water is drunk from them. The fields of the netherworld produce no grain; no flour is eaten from them. The sheep of the netherworld produce no wool; no cloth is woven from them.' "

The day grew cooler.

" 'You shall not be able to drink the water meant for you; you shall not sit in the shade intended for you. The date palm will not reveal its beauty for you.' "

A strange wind began to howl through the city.

The mad gleam was back in Malik's eyes. He read on, his voice carrying over the rising storm: " 'You are a field threshed by a demon—you must scream at it. He has put manacles on your hands—you must scream at it. He has put a neck-stock on your neck—you must scream at it.' "

The sky over Thebes went dark.

" 'The thresher sails with me,' " Malik shouted. " 'Why should you sail? The man who has bound my hands sails with me. Why should you sail? The man who has tied my arms sails with me. _Why should you sail?_' "

There was a clap of thunder.

()()()

The High Priest of Amun let fall the fleshy dead hand of the emissary of Mitanni.

"What was that noise?" he said.

Seated a judicious distance away, from where he had been watching his cousin's examination of the corpse with naked admiration shining on his face, the Living Embodiment of God and Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt blinked and shook his head.

"What noise?" he said, dazed. He rested his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands and looked at his cousin with wide eyes. "I didn't hear anything."

()()()

As the last rumblings died away, Isis Ishtar experienced a wave of foreboding so strong she had to sit down.

()()()

In the bowels of the palace, quite deaf to any cosmic disturbances, the Head Chef beheaded his last goose. He tottered toward his sous-chefs to review the progress of their soups over a floor slick with blood and fishgut.

()()()

At the first crack of thunder, Ryou's flesh creeped and all the hair on his scalp stood on end. With a considerable effort, he suppressed his natural instinct to run away screaming and froze in place instead, quivering like a rabbit, his hands pressed to his ears and his eyes screwed shut against the roaring sound.

()()()

The waters of the Nile roiled beneath the emissary of the Hittites, as did his cabin boy, who bit down on his fist but could not quite stifle his moan.

()()()

Further east over the Urals, the Yellow Emperor's Second Consort delivered a stop-thrust with her _qiang_ that killed the barbarian warlord and put a hole in the man behind him.

In the far north, several pieces of a would-be usurper were tossed unceremoniously into a bog.

A pair of stars winked out, one after the other.

The narrator coughed.

()()()

Deep underground in the Theban necropolis, in the darkness that lay heavy on the eyes of the tomb robber, in the still dusty air that only the tomb robber breathed, _something moved_.

* * *

><p>A note on Malik's poems—<p>

They are real and come from a primary documents packet in a history class I took some years ago. The first is an excerpt from a Babylonian love/praise hymn, and I think is meant to coax the goddess Inanna into speaking a good fate for the king. The second, about a 'short silvery girl' and 'genitals with two fingers,' is a curse of sorts. The text of the third, slightly altered, comes from Ningishzida's Journey to the Netherworld.


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